ERA-Interim/Land is a global land surface reanalysis data set covering the
period 1979–2010. It describes the evolution of soil moisture, soil
temperature and snowpack. ERA-Interim/Land is the result of a single 32-year
simulation with the latest ECMWF (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts) land surface model driven by meteorological
forcing from the ERA-Interim atmospheric reanalysis and precipitation
adjustments based on monthly GPCP v2.1 (Global Precipitation Climatology
Project). The horizontal resolution is about 80 km and the time frequency is
3-hourly. ERA-Interim/Land includes a number of parameterization
improvements in the land surface scheme with respect to the original
ERA-Interim data set, which makes it more suitable for climate studies
involving land water resources. The quality of ERA-Interim/Land is assessed
by comparing with ground-based and remote sensing observations. In
particular, estimates of soil moisture, snow depth, surface albedo,
turbulent latent and sensible fluxes, and river discharges are verified
against a large number of site measurements. ERA-Interim/Land provides a
global integrated and coherent estimate of soil moisture and snow water
equivalent, which can also be used for the initialization of numerical
weather prediction and climate models.